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AT the XVI International Conference on AIDS in Toronto in August 2006, assurances that the world was succeeding in fighting AIDS appeared shaky, or at least part of a new positive global ‘‘spin’’provided by the international agencies and the new AIDS celebrities (former US President Bill Clinton, philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, actor Richard Gere and the then UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis). In fact, the pandemic is not under control in sub-Saharan Africa, in South, Eastern and Central Asia, or in parts of the Asia–Pacific region. Even in the USA, among minority ethnic and racial populations HIV prevalence continues to rise, if unevenly. Moreover, among the gay communities of the developed world, for so long the best examples of successful and early prevention efforts, there is talk of resurgent epidemics and of largely hidden epidemics among men who have sex with men in Latin …